The The NSW Writers' Centre

Elizabeth Cowell is a freelance editor and publishing consultant with over ten years' experience working with major Australian publishers. She discussed the editing process and the importance of writers' groups with us recently.   What is your role in the development of a manuscript? As an editor you must have to be very diplomatic at times! The editor's role shifts and changes depending ...

No one can avoid grammar. Even if you can't tell a pronoun from a participle at ten paces, you're still an amateur grammarian; you employ it, at quite a sophisticated level, every time you speak or text or make a half-decent sentence, even a sentence fragment. You need grammar if you want to make sense, no matter how fast you want ...

Representatives of the Australia Council recently visited us for an information hour of power regarding all things funding-related in the Literature and Arts' grants sector. For those who missed out, this session was about opening up a discussion with writers, Writers’ Centre members, and literary-minded artists concerned with how and where to seek funding for a literary project. We were thrilled to ...

You may have thought all the hard work was over: goodbye to those nights slaving over plot lines and tweaking dialogue, farewell to those days building up to penning the final page, the final paragraph, the final sentence. Once it's done, it's done, right? Well... not really. Now comes the searching for a publisher, the revision, the editing, correcting the appalling ...

We spoke with Felicity Castagna ahead of her workshop with us on June 16. Your last book Small Indiscretions: Stories of Travel in Asia and your upcoming release The Incredible Here and Now are both concerned with the idea of place, but seem like very different works. Did you face different challenges in writing these books? Both works are ultimately about exploring ...

  How do you strike a balance between recognising that young adult readers are no longer children, but are not quite fully fledged adults either? Do you ever second guess yourself and tone down or take out particular scenes or plot lines? I spend a great deal of time before I start my draft, getting to know my characters. I create profiles,  ...

What is the main attraction of writing scripts? One of the reasons writers are attracted to writing scripts is that as a general rule, script writers, certainly those working in television, are better paid than novelists. But of course, money is not the only reward. Writing scripts allows a writer to work in dimensions which go beyond the verbal, to include ...

Some errors just keep popping up over and over again. Here are five of the most common: Errors of fact Our ability to get things wrong is considerable. When I was editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest magazine, we had researchers who checked everything. They came up with numerous elementary errors made by top journalists - from misspelt names to incorrect figures. So double-check ...

What is it that you love about the short story? For a few years now I've been writing in author bios that I had a crush on the short story, that I was madly in love with the short story, that I was still in love... I guess I love everything about short stories. I love the way you can read ...

Angelo Loukakis kicked off last week’s First Friday Club with a brassy iPhone recording of jazz clarinettist, Edmond Hall. Hall played in Louis Armstrong’s All Stars band in the 1950s, and indeed, was a famous New Orleans jazz, Swing, and big band performer in his own right. His frenetic clarinet rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown delighted our audience of members—acting ...